Photography: It's not just the future that's digital

Now it's the present, too. Nikon currently makes 7 film cameras, but has announced plans to reduce that number to 2. Which models and when are topics Nikon won't talk about, but if you thought that film had a future, this is a good indication that it doesn't.

Nikon film camera bodies account for about 3% of the company's sales. Digital cameras hit 75% and much of the remaining 22% of income is digital, too -- scanners, for example.

I'd been thinking of selling my film cameras, but this announcement makes them all but worthless now. About all I can do is hope that eventually they'll become trendy nostalgia items. When I asked one of the nation's largest camera stores -- one with a huge collection of used equipment for sale -- what my Nikon cameras would be worth a year ago, they weren't even slightly interested.

"Film at 11" used to be the tease on all the TV stations. Today I can't imagine any TV station still using film because video is faster, easier to edit, and easier to store. If you read the sports pages in the newspapers, you'll see that coaches still talk about "watching films" even though what they've watched for the past 20 years or more has been video tape. Maybe film will remain in our minds, if not in our cameras.

There will always be film "purists" who see something "better" in film. There are people today who feel that "pinhole" cameras (without lenses) are more "honest". Some people still do use wet plates, although that technology has been outmoded for more than a century.

Many film formats no longer exist (620, for example, which is essentially 120 roll film on a different spool.) People can create 620 film by respooling 120 film.

I suspect that a few commercial photographers will continue to use film (mainly large format) for 5 to 10 years. After that, the economics (cost of film, processing, & pollution) will eliminate film as video tape has eliminated the TV "film at 11."

Some hobbyists may hold out a bit longer, but most will look at the advantages digital offers and decide that digital is the way to go.

Advantages:

• Cost. The pictures cost nothing unless you print them. (You will pay for storage media, but DVDs are readily available to hold hundreds of images for less than half a dollar.) With film and cheap processing, each shutter click costs at least 30 cents and top-quality processing will push that to nearly a dollar.
• Darkroom without a darkroom: Those who want to adjust color, gamma, or contrast, or who want to make minor repairs to images can do so easily.
• Speed: Combine digital photography with the Internet and you can share a picture of a new baby with relatives halfway around the world in minutes.
• Scrapbooking: Wow! Has this ever become big. I saw a book that a co-worker's wife made for her parents; it was a masterful job that could never have been done as well without digital images.
• Quality: Digital cameras match and, in some cases, exceed film's quality. For commercial photographers, this means a Hasselblad camera with a $20,000 digitizing back, but the savings in film and processing costs will pay back the investment in a year or less for a busy studio.

Film will eventually disappear because the market for film will continue to shrink and eventually those who insist on film will find themselves paying $20 for a roll of 36-exposure 35mm film because the batches manufacturing batches are so small, and paying $50 to have the roll processed and printed (because processing will also become a specialized operation).

A friend of mine used to do a lot of work with slide film and 10 years ago every city with more than 100,000 people would have at least a few places that would process (E6) a roll in less than an hour for about $5. Today you'll find only a few places in the entire country that run E6 and many of them don't have enough work to run the machines daily.

That's where film is going even though there are people who predict that Kodak and Fuji will "always" make film. For the past 10 years, Kodak has been repositioning itself as "the picture company" instead of "the film company" and, if you look at history, you'll find that people predicted there would always be a market for slide rules, watch springs, and buggy whips.

What about quality? I have some 30x40-inch photos taken with a semi-pro digital camera in 2002. They're at least as good as images I created 15 years ago with 6x6 (cm) roll film. In the final analysis, the quality of an image depends more on the photographer than on the equipment. Put a $10 disposable camera in the hands of a pro and you'll get good pictures. Put a $6000 digital camera in the hands of somebody with no training or talent and the result will be junk.

Digital cameras need to be treated as if they're loaded with slide film. What's the difference? Negative film needs to be exposed for the shadows and slide film needs to be exposed for the highlights. This makes film photographers crazy until they get used to it and it's one of the reasons that some film photographers have been unhappy about digital quality.

Commercial photographers who do large-format work have depended on 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras, but many of them have adopted digital for the reasons I mentioned earlier (speed, control, cost). But they don't use a $250 Canon. They may still use a 4x5 camera. Instead of a film holder, the camera will have a digital back that set them back $60,000 or so. The digital back is connected directly to a computer (undoubtedly a dual-processor G5 Mac).

No matter how you look at it, the future of imaging is digital.

Konica Minolta exits the photo business

George Eastman is probably spinning at about 78rpm these days. A week or so ago, Nikon announced that it would all but halt production of film cameras (for the immediate future, Nikon will continue to produce 2 film cameras) and now Konica Minolta has announced that it's getting out of the photo biz altogether.

Konica Minolta has signed an agreement with Sony to take over the company's digital SLR cameras. This follows an agreement in mid 2005 to jointly develop digital SLRs with Sony. Note that the agreement is for Minolta's digital cameras only. The company will "withdraw from camera business, such as film cameras and digital cameras" by the end of March.

Why? According to Konica Minolta's announcement, "The traditional silver-halide photographic market is shrinking astonishingly by the surge of the worldwide digitization. In such a changing world, profits for camera and photo businesses worsened in recent years, and it became necessary to drastically reform business structure for the further growth of Konica Minolta." In plain English, that means the market for film and film cameras is about as robust as the one for the watch springs, slide rules, and buggy whips I mentioned earlier.

Konica Minolta says it will concentrate on non-consumer businesses, such as the core “business technologies field,” the strategic “optics and display devices” field, and the growth expected “medical imaging” and “sensing” fields.

Minolta was a leader in silver-halide photography. The company produced Japan’s first photographic paper in 1903 and Japan’s first color film in 1940. The company's mini-labs are used in 1-hour processing labs world-wide. The company was ahead of even Nikon in some regards, having introduced the world’s first body-integral autofocus SLR camera, in 1985.

This is a story with "no film at 11."

Have you heard from the "sergeant" in Iraq?

Antivirus distributors are reporting an e-mail scam that attempts to fool computer users into participating in a bogus business deal with a US military sergeant based in Baghdad.

First of all, if you participate in a bunko deal such as this, anything that happens to you is OK as far as I'm concerned. The messages in question claim to come from Sgt. Richard Murphy, who claims to be based in Iraq. They offer you half or a $15 million fortune that the "sergeant" is attempting to get out of Iraq.

Police know that a bunko artist can never get money out of an honest person, so if you've responded to "Sgt" Murphy, all I can say is this: Sorry about your luck, creep. The e-mail messages have the subject line "Urgent and Confidential from Sgt Richard Murphy," and start this way:

I hope my email meets you well. I am in need of your assistance. My name is Sgt Richard Murphy, I am in the Military Engineering Unit here Baghdad, Iraq. We have about $15 Million US dollars that we want to move out of the country. My colleagues and I need a good partner, someone we can trust. This is a risk free and legal business (oil money)."

Or maybe you've heard from the "personal secretary" to billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. These e-mail messages offer almost $10 million to those who will help transfer of $46 million of Khodorkovsky's fortune.

Who? Khodorkovsky was CEO of Russian oil company Yukos. He was arrested in 2003 and is serving an 8-year prison sentence on tax and fraud charges.

Until now, most of the e-mail messages about Khodorkovsky were in Russian, but now they are appearing in English.

Both of these are typical "419" scams. The number refers to section 419 of the Nigerian penal code. Nigeria is the source of many of these scams. The goal is to get the "victim" (aka "idiot") to pay "processing" fees for the ill-gotten money. If you fall for the trap, the scammers will steal your money and possibly your identity.

Honest people never, ever fall for this kind of trap. Er, crap. Er, crap-trap. Or clap-trap. Whatever.

Nerdly News

Columbus: The China connection

China's Lenovo (formerly IBM) is offering 2 ThinkCentre desktop computers at MicroCenter. This is the first time Lenovo or IBM has had desktops on retail shelves since the Aptiva disappeared in 1999.

MicroCenter has 19 retail location, including 2 in Columbus, and also sells via its website. Lenovo put several ThinkPad notebooks on Office Depot's shelves last year. This year's MicroCenter offerings include the E50 with Intel's Celeron 331 processor and 256MB of memory for $459. There's also a Pentium 4 until with 512MB of memory for less than $750. Similar models are available though CDW.com and PCConnection.com.

Don't make Googley eyes at me

Google doesn't want to cooperate with the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been searching for. (NOTE: For those who believe that every time I mention any government agency I am bashing the president of the United States of America, allow me to point out that this is not an attempt to bad-mouth the Bush administration.)

Google has so far refused to comply with a White House subpoena to hand over the records. The government wants a list all requests Google handled in an unspecified week and information about 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases. The administration says the information is vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that US Supreme Court deemed to be unconstitutional.

Yahoo and Microsoft have complied with similar government subpoenas. America Online says it didn't fully comply, but did provide a list of search requests that were already available from other sources.

The government says it isn't seeking data about specific searches by identifiable users, but the subpoenas raise privacy concerns. The Department of Justice says Google's cooperation is necessary for it to simulate how people navigate the Web.

Coming to Itunes: The almost hits

Universal Music Group plans to work with Apple's Itunes to make available more than 100,000 European tracks that are no longer available on records or CDs.

Among the tunes planned for release are "A Man Without Love" by Engelbert Humperdinck, "Strange Weather" by Marianne Faithfull, "Ballades et Mots d'Amour" by Jacques Brel, "In Real Time" by Fairport Convention, "Bubble Gum" by Brigitte Bardot, and "The End of the Beginning" by Eddie and the Hot Rods.

Initially there will be about 3000 tracks, but this will grow over the next 4 years to more than 100,000 selections.

The albums will sell online for about $8.50 starting next month.

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